Jean-Claude Milner (1941–)

Currently Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Université de Paris-VII, and a former director of the Collège Internationale
de Philosophie (1998–2001), Jean-Claude Milner has pursued a diverse intellectual career comprised of academic contributions
to linguistics, critical engagements with Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as, more recently, a series of essays concerning anti-Semitism in European history and culture. For the past several
years, Milner has held a seminar devoted to this theme at the Institut d’études levinassiennes in Paris. In 1960, after completing
his khâgne at the lycée Henri-IV, Milner entered the École Normale Supérieure, where he took courses with Louis Althusser and developed a close friendship with Jacques-Alain Miller, a friendship that would be instrumental in the founding and direction of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse several years later. Among the members of the Cercle d’Épistémologie, for which he served as secretary, Milner was notable for his special interest in linguistics. In addition to following the
teaching of Jacques Lacan, Milner also displayed an early engagement with the writings of Roland Barthes and Roman Jakobson, the latter of whom would
secure for Milner a short term postdoctoral fellowship at MIT in 1966. The exposure to Noam Chomsky’s work was formative for
Milner, who translated Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) into French in 1971. In many ways faithful to Lacan’s original teaching despite these heterogeneous influences, his
work also displays an engagement with Anglophone philosophy of science (e.g., Popper and Lakatos) that accounts for Milner’s
unique perspective on the Lacanian enterprise; see in particular Milner’s L’Oeuvre claire (1995).

Like many of the normaliens involved in the Cahiers, Milner experienced May 1968 as a cataclysmic personal and political event. In the years that followed, he was an active
participant along with Jacques-Alain Miller in the Maoist group the Gauche Proléterienne. Milner has recently published his
reflections on these years, which contrast greatly with those of Alain Badiou, in a book titled L’Arrogance du présent (2009). Despite their current differences, much of Milner’s work in the wake of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse concerning the nature and function of names was instrumental for Badiou’s project well as for many others inspired by Lacan’s
reconfiguration of the modern subject. In his works L’Amour de la langue (1978) and Les Noms indistincts (1983), Milner developed the conception of language to be found in his most significant contribution to the Cahiers, ‘Le Point du signifiant’. In this article, a reading of Plato’s Sophist, Milner suggested that the proper name functions as the mark of an errant negativity, or non-being, that alternately serves as a function or term in discursive
sequences. With his emphasis on the essentially vacillating and errant nature of subjectivity, Milner negotiated a path between
the positions in the journal represented by Miller and Badiou.